My Artist Friend

Greg Lakebrink is perhaps my oldest continuous friend in this world. I met him at St. Louis University in the fall of 1968. We were both in the honors program there, as freshmen. Later we were both involved with publishing a kind of bohemian newspaper called The Aardwolf. Greg was essentially the art director. He also contributed the name of the piece. Later on, after I had moved to Springfield in 1972 and then split with my wife, Becky McGovern, and ended up living with Pat on Scarritt Street in 1974, Greg called me up from Iowa City where he had just quit the Graduate Painting Program at U. of Iowa, three hours short of his MFA, and asked if he could come look for work in Springfield.

Greg then lived at Scarritt until 1977, when he moved out and took an apartment in the Iles House (the oldest house in Springfield) when it was down on South Fifth Street. They moved it over to Seventh Street a few years ago. Greg lived in a large one room on the top floor.

The entire time I have known Greg he has painted, mainly water colors, but many oils. In my living room right now there are three of Greg's oils, one of my son when he was six (1976), one of me painted in 1981 that I didn't even know about that he gave to Kimb when we moved away in 1999, and a third one that I seem to have always had, known as The Red Lady, painted in 1969. There are many photos that have the Red Lady in the background. The irony is that the figure is actually a guy wearing a red apron.

Anyway, Greg eventually married a beautiful strange woman, Evan Kurrasch, who was taller than him, and looked like Vanessa Redgrave. She had, however, been in a camp stove accident and had much scarring over her body. I always thought that Greg really liked that, as an artist it appealed to him visually. In any case, he was married to Evan for five or six years, but she was very highly sexed, and he was not. I performed the marriage ceremony for them, in the nature preserve south of Springfield. My one marriage and it failed, ultimately.

Evan is married to someone elsenow. And Greg eventually married this funny, sweet woman, Sybil, who is also a visual artist. They live over on Fayette, near Washington Park, in a charming little Victorian place. Greg and Evan had a house on that street right across from the med school parking lot down at the end of Bond there. The med school scarfed it up and he had to move to Fayette somewhere along there. He had this really long backyard that stuck out behind houses on Bond and he and Evan let the grass grow like the tall grass prairie. Eventually the city made them cut it all down. They were always big Sierra Club people. Greg did the Sierra Club newsletter for many years. Also the Springfield Bicycle Club newsletter. Greg is to this day one of the true liberals I know. He's the kind of guy who's been giving money to NOW and the abortion rights people for many years now. He's a true person, if you know what I mean. No lies, no dissembling. Not much tact, either.

I used to always call on Greg when I needed artwork for a project. He did many drawings for The Writers BarBQ. He did most of the art in The Village Magazine 1979, for the Vachel Lindsay centennial. For that one, it was a rush job, he required me to be a Cardinals fan for a year. I was always a big Cubs fan. Greg grew up in St. Anne, the suburb of St. Louis out by the airport. He went to St. Louis University High School, the Jesuit high school. I went to the Jesuit high school in Wichita, Chaplain Kapaun Memorial High School, and had many teachers who had gone to SLU High and to SLU. And eventually I went to St. Louis University. My sister's Phd in literature is from SLU.

As a matter of fact, my sister going to St. Louis U. for grad school is how I got involved in this whole thing. My sister, Kathy, was great friends with Sandy and John Knoll in St. Louis. She and Sandy shared an office both at the grad lit dept. at SLU and then at Forest Park Community College. Then Sandy and John moved to Springfield. so John could run the Communications Department at Sangamon State University. Larry Smith was John's colleague there, and the four of them, the Smiths and the Knolls, became friends and eventually lived across the street from each other.

That fact facilitated the affair that Pat had with John for the two years before I moved to Springfield with my wife, Becky McGovern, in January of 1972. I met Jane Morrel in the fall of 72 when Knoepfle had his first poetry seminar. I had taken Knoepfle's novel writing class at St. Louis university, where he was the poet in residence. John Knoll had gotten him to move to SSU. (Knoll also brought Norman Hinton to Springfield. Norman was on my sister's Phd board.) Anyway, Sandy Martin and Pat were best friends, so my relationship with Pat Smith comes from my sister's friendship with the Knolls in St. Louis. Sandy's brother was a priest, Harry Martin, and Harry performed my first marriage to Becky McGovern in February of 1970. We were pregnant, of course. Stupid catholic kids. Harry also performed the funeral service for my friends' Nora and Jack's four month old baby, Emil Zapata Jones two years later. We called him Harry the Pot Smoking Priest. He was a good guy and was a protege of Knoepfle's in St. Louis.

Complex histories of a personal nature. I do know where most of these people are today. I saw Greg about four years ago in Springfield. He and his wife both have fairly serious health problems. I know he is working somewhere, but I don't know where.

I have a collection of his water colors. He came to writing group for many, many years. Of course he lived at Scarritt when the first group was meeting there. Greg has also come to pretty much every group I had in Springfield. He would come and sit in the corner and paint people and small scenes. So there are perhaps a couple of hundred of these watercolors that catalog the many years of my writing groups. And many of these watercolors are so beautiful. He really is a great artist.

Hey, you know, I love Greg. He's a really weird guy. He has what is called flatness of effect and often he seems removed, but at heart he has a beautiful passionate soul. I have a little book of his poems on my shelf that I still pull out from time to time and read through. He has always been a true friend to me. He has put me up when I was thrown out, he has sheltered me when Bill Panichi beat me up. He has given me money when I needed to get back to Springfield from Wichita in 1983.

May he live in the Lady's mercy and know Her great love.

Forgotten Birthday

One year, when I was married to Becky Bradway, she completely forgot my birthday. That very day she forgot to pick me up from work. I remember, walking south on South Fifth street, I got to South Grand Avenue, on my way to our house on Bryn Mawr, at least fifteen more blocks, and she came driving up and said we should go out to dinner, as it was my birthday. Of course we ended up going to a mexican restaurant on the east side that was new. Becky was a mexican food freak. Not my thing, but she was one of those people it was easier to do what she wanted then to deal with the weirdness of her not getting her way.

As a matter of fact, she was better at giving off a hostile vibe then anyone I'd ever met. I conjecture that it was because when she was a child, being abused both by her father and her mother, if she said anything they actually used soap in her mouth and basically hurt her. So she got really good at just giving off the fuck you vibe. Her grasp of that darkness was pretty much complete. I undertstand, of course, why she was like that, what had happened to her as a child. When we had separated and she was living down the street under Laura Giese and her husband, she would come for dinner every night. Why not? I cooked it and cleaned it. I paid for it. She did this for nearly the whole year she lived down the street before she engineered moving to Bloomington to go to ISU to get her doctorate. Of course that was right after she promised me, signed a paper, that she would never move Paige out of town. Anyway, I used to say to her, hearing all that was going on in her head about her family and about working for Rape World (which is what she called ICASA, the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault) that she could turn out to be a serial murderer and if people knew what she had been through they would understand.

But that business about breaking her promise was par for the course for my relationship with Becky. She basically broke every promise she ever made to me. And we were together for fourteen years, first fuck to last. To be precise though, I lived with Pat the first year and a half, though I was sleeping with Becky, and Pat knew it. I spent that year looking for work, after having lived off of Pat for six and a half years. Mind you, I was the housewife in that relationship. Well, that and the fuck toy.

So I am always of two minds about Becky Bradway. I have enormous sympathy for her. I lived with her family for several years in the early 1980s, and they were definitely so screwed up you could pretty much taste it. But I had no idea how truly cruel they had been. So, I feel bad for what happened to that little girl.

But I also despise her for how she treated me. Mind you, I am grateful I am no longer with her. And I am very glad she found a decent man, Doug, to be there for her. She will always be a serious user, and she will suck up all the resources that are around her if you let her. I was a very co-dependent guy when I was with her. I did not resist any of that. My mother made me into the one in my family who gave in to the younger kids and to my sisters. Basically I learned to do what other people wanted to keep the peace.

This personality trait serves me well now. The woman I live with these days is also very much a giver. I've really never been with anyone who seemed to take my feelings into consideration as much as Kimberly does.

I still remember walking down that street, in late June. I must've been 42 or 43 that day. It was depressing.

Thanks to the Lady Arianrhod for helping me live through that time. She sent me the possibility of a true priestess to be with, and sure enough. I can practically see the curved moon tattoo upon her brow. Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Moving to Springfield

I've decided to resurrect this blog which started out as a series of scans of notebook pages from the 1970s. I still intend to do that some, but I thought I would now devote this section of my piece of the internet to remembering the people and places I lived and worked in the 70s and 80s.

Primarily then this is a story of my view of the literary community, small fry division, in Springfield, Illinois.

I ended up in Springfield pretty much because I got lost one day on the way to Peoria. I had been to see the Who at the Mississippi River Festival the previous evening. There was vast quantities of smokeables and drinkables and there were too many people there. It took place in a natural bowl, outside, which comfortably held about 20,000. 35,000 showed up. We went early. Actually our party sent someone out around noon for a nine o'clock show. I went with Russell Mill and his wife and his brother from Texas who had brought a suitcase of pot up to sell to pay for the trip. Russell ran the Akashic Record Store, which was in Webster Groves at this time. The Who had just brought out the album, Who's Next, and they played all of it and most of Tommy, and there was a half hour encore of Eddie Cochran songs. It was great. Particularly memorable for me, lo these nearly forty years later, it was the first time I heard the song "Bargain." It really moved me, and it still does. Of course, I don't remember leaving, getting home, any of that. Lots of marijuana and wine.

My wife in those days was Becky McGovern. We had married in February 1970 because, primarily, Becky was pregnant with the human being Joel Osburn. I was a good catholic boy and abortion was out of the question at this point. Two and a half years later, having struggled to be together and to make enough money to keep going Becky and I drove to Kansas City to get an abortion, in September of 1972. I have no regrets about having Joel, though. He is a remarkable person and has made himself a good life. And he has given me two beautiful granddaughters.

So Becky and Joel were at Becky's parents house in Peoria. I was supposed to get up that morning and drive to Peoria and eventually bring them back to St. Louis. But, to be honest, I got up way late and hopped in the car and didn't really have a clear idea of what I was doing. Anyone who's driven Highway 55 past Springfield knows that the left hand lane goes into town with little warning.

So I found myself on the south side of Springfield, Illinois, lost and a little disconcerted. I remembered that two of my old friends had moved to Springfield a couple of years before. John Knoll, and his wife Sandy Martin, were originally friends of my sister Kathy Osburn. Kathy went to graduate school at St. Louis U., one of the reasons Mother stuck me there. She knew Sandy from the Literature Dept. where they shared an office as Grad Assts. Later she and Sandy both taught at the new community college, Forest Park Community College, by the great St. Louis park.

John Knoll did the coursework for his PHd at SLU. Then he was hired at a new college in Springfield, Sangamon State University. John was the head of the communications department. His specialty was film and he knew much about it. He and Sandy lived on North Sixth Street in the Hatch Mansion, a property they rented from the Marine Bank.

So I called John Knoll from a payphone (remember those?) and his brother from Indiana answered, Jerry. And Jerry said John was out but hey, come on over. So I drove all the way across town to the north side and went in and then John and Sandy came home and I had a great time hanging out with them. I called Becky in Peoria and she was not pleased with me. They'd called the state police. So that wasn't good.

Before I left I was talking with John and told him I was hoping to go back to college. I was working at the post office in downtown St. Louis, 18th and Market, on the graveyard shift. I said I was looking at that crazy school in Ohio, Antioch. And John said, why don't you go to Sangamon. And I said, what's that? So he told me about his school and his gig and how he could get me in and pretty soon it turned out to be a plan.

Becky and I spent the next six months driving to Springfield and staying with John and Sandy in the maid's quarters of the big house and looking for a place to live and getting set for the school.

SSU at the time was a senior college, last two years. So I had to CLEP into the program. Which was no problem. In those days I took multiple choice tests like peanuts. I always did well.

Finally, Becky and Joel and I moved to Springfield in February 1972. I lived there, on and off, for the next 27 years, finally escaping to New Hampshire in 1999.